- Spotlight on Features - Sheet metal: why are those cutouts stretched in the folded body?- Spotlight on Features - Save auto-recover info after meshing and after running a simulation study.- Noteworthy Solutions from the SW KB.

The tech landscape is alive and kicking and I feel like the tech is maturing at an even rate. Products are getting updates, patches and improvements but no crazy new technology breaks yet. As we head into the end of the first quarter of 2014, I am interested to see what the summer product announcements and developer's conferences will bring.

SolidWorks World 2014 proceedings site is up and all the presentations and videos are available for download and viewing. Whether you attended an just couldn't go to certain sessions or was not even in San Diego that week, you have a resource to go in search of nuggets!

The SolidWorks Blog is covered with many marketing pieces on Mechanical Conceptual but nothing is yet out for the public as far as licenses or access as of yet. A better part of the VAR channel is just getting a few fingers into it but no mass access yet either. Hope to have more news as it's availability becomes more accessible. ~Lou

Over the past month it has been incredibly busy for SolidWorks resellers as they hold events all over the world to rollout SolidWorks 2014 and show off all the goodies to customers. "2014 RoadShow" this year was 7 cities for DDi so travel for the past month has been busy.

SolidWorks 2014 seems to be a huge refocus on SolidWork core, bringing enhancements and refinements to the core CAD platform. Obviously the entire product line was refreshed but customers seems to be stoked about the core updates.

It also appears that many manufactures like Google, Microsoft and Apple now have their updated products in the channel in time for the Holiday season shopping spree. Google's Nexus 5 has shipped, Surface 2 is out and it is iPad-palooza over at Apple. Happy Techsgiving! ~Lou

Beta season is here and SolidWorks 2014 product line is up for testing. In addition to testing out the next major release of SolidWorks, Microsoft has also launched a preview edition on Windows 8.1 for anyone to download and test. Both Beta 1 and Windows 8.1 have guides to see what is new to help with a roadmap for testing what matters to your use case.

With every new services that launches, some are shut down and on July 1st I decided to shut down THE HEaRD, the micro blog (twitter-like open source clone) that I ran for nearly 5 years. It was a hard decision but with the ubiquity of social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus, I decided to put my effort there directly instead of using THE HEaRD as a hub for my SolidWorks activity. I had been contemplating it for a year or so but when the lead developer moved on, that was my final push. Thank you all who were part of the community! ~Lou

Tech Alerts:- SolidWorks EPDM 2013 SP0 is available for download- Would you like to help define the future of SW? (survey)- SolidWorks 2013 SP0 is available for download- Creation of Inspection Documentation and Related Data (survey)

SolidWorks Beta is over, pre-release has now come to a close and SolidWorks 2013 SP0 has shipped! Now that the newest release is available to the general public, we can all get started really getting serious about moving to the latest and greatest.

One of the pieces of news that came out last week was that SolidWorks 2013 will ship with full Windows 8 support right out of the gate at service pack 0. With many of the Microsoft legacy products coming to retirement (Windows XP, Server 2003, Windows Vista) it is great to see support even before the official launch on October 26th! I have been running Windows 8 since it's first debut in the developer preview and now that RTM has shipped (release to manufacturing), it is my primary OS.

After 11 years of presenting and talking to customers about the newest release of software, it is great to see some genuine excitement to upgrade immediately since SolidWorks 2013 seems to have some focus on a lot of core features. Time will tell but so far the SP0 build seems to be pretty solid. ~Lou

Well SolidWorks lifted the embargo of the 2013 beta program allowing everyone to say whatever they like about the new product. SolidWorks also has continued to push out a number of updates and "Sneak Peaks" of the next major release of the SolidWorks product line. 2013 looks good and we are going to be starting the What's New Series here soon.

About this time every year right after SolidWorks makes a pre-release version of the next build of SolidWorks available to the public, a number of in-depth posts start to surface about the product. This is when you can really get a feel of what users impressions of the product is. This release is about small upgrades and necessary enhancements to much of the core product.

As we begin next week to break down the entire What's New manual, you will also get a sense of what the real goals were with this release. The product that seems to have gotten a large UI and functionality update is Enterprise PDM, especially on the administrative side of the product. What are your thoughts thus far? ~Lou

Another month has passed and since we are in full beta season, I am surprised by how much news we had this month! With the launch of SolidWorks Electrical, the launch of 2013 Beta 2 and tons of great technical posts on the SW Blog, there was no shortage of topics to discuss.

Here at SolidWorks HEARD! I recently moved the site over to a new platform that supports "responsive design", which will scale all assets (graphics and pictures) as well as change the layout based on the size of the device you visit with. In conjunction with this being the 400th show, I wanted to take the opportunity to refresh the show layout and branding as well.

As soon as the embargo on 2013 beta is lifted, we will be breaking down all the changes and new editions that are coming and give you an easy way to parse what enhancement or changes matter to your workflow. Thanks again for listening and look forward to your feedback. ~Lou

What a monster month for tech news around SolidWorks! With the launch of Beta and a number of other things going on in the tech industry, July is starting off awesome. Another patch launched for both SolidWorks and EPDM (SP4) which finally puts the Toolbox issue to rest. This was a major setback for many customers and I am glad to report this fix is here!

The SolidWorks blog continues to post awesome content for users, populating 90% of it with posts from application engineers around the world with fresh, useful tech tips. Not only is the content fresh and detailed, it also seems to cover a number of products from Simulation to Drawings. Keep up the great work guys!

This past month Google had it's big developer event, Google I/O, which has always been a time where new builds of Android are detailed as well as the announcement of new hardware. This year Google finally has entered the tablet market with the Nexus 7 (yes mine is on order) which is a 7" form factor and comes at half the cost of the cheapest iPad. I am looking forward to reviewing this device soon! ~Lou

With SolidWorks bringing on more and more guest bloggers from the application engineers across the world, the quality of content has boomed and the posts are deep! It is a welcome change to see so many posts that are beneficial to customers and real users of the software. From someone who has been critical of the marketing fluff, hats off to SolidWorks for responding BIG!

We are starting to move into Beta season so it will not be a surprise if we start to see more activity building to the release of Beta 1. There are also more rumblings with cad in a browser, obviously early stages and viewers but steps in that direction non the less. I am interested to see what will transpire over the coming 12 months and what advancements will be available to the general public. There are a lot of concepts and ideas but no products that make me want to drop what I use today.

Local hardware still is very appealing especailly with the speeds of SSD and high resolutions screens that are hitting the market. As much as I love my 17" notebook, I don't really enjoy carrying it around. Apple introducing a 15" notebok at 4.5lb with the resolution of a 30" high resolution monitor is interesting. Wonder how that will work for CAD and the horsepower needed on the graphics card! Time will tell. ~Lou

The past month has been a great month for tech news in the CAD industry. SolidWorks is bringing the content to their blog that users want by reaching out to the application engineer network across their reseller network. These are the people in the trenches with users and use the software daily and have endless tips, trick and other great view on these tools.

With the launch of eDrawings for iPad, SolidWorks is going to get an influx of user response, both positive and negative about how they want to use their 3D CAD data via mobile. The application has been patched since it's release but still is lacking the big features and device support that a vast majority of user that have responded are asking for. Good start but long road ahead to awesome!

This month's SWSMFAQ is awesome, packed full of goodies for users across a number of products and aspects. SolidWorks KB has improved so much over the past 4 or so years and is still a place I start when trying to solve issues. Sometimes it has great examples, downloads and sample code snippets to help is almost every aspect of the SolidWorks product line. This is a packed show, buckle up! ~Lou

Tax Day!... Ugg. Here is the US the dreaded April 15th rolls around and for those of us who had to pay...a moment of silence. Anyway, tech news can be a little thin during this time of year right before the hot beta season kicks off but still a ton going on.

SolidWorks has made some great strides to get more technical content into the SolidWorks blog by inviting some guest bloggers from their reseller (VAR) channel. This has already brought some great posts into the fold and I hope to see more of it continue over the coming months.

With the release of SolidWorks Plastics, 2012 SP3 and more technical content, tech news is easier to come by these days. I should get some time on SWPL over the coming weeks and recap the thoughts so far. We did get it installed yesterday and the interface is really nice and workflow is simple with a lot of configuration options so stayed tuned! ~Lou